Drowning
by earlymornings
Summary: Fill for hannibalkink prompt "Will has something akin to a panic attack at a crime scene. Bystanders watch puzzled as Hannibal unhesitantly holds his shaking form, speaks comforting quiet words and aids him back to a grounded calm. Bonus points for Hannibal helping Will put his glasses back on." Warnings for STRONG consensual violence. Not fluff.


It's another girl. You stand there in the bathroom, staring at the half filled tub (not like the fancy ones in the movies where girls die glamorously, but a little rundown unit with mold on the walls and a leaky faucet.) She's propped up on a wooden board with a few straps on it, her legs a foot higher than her head. Her hair pools near the drain.

It hurts you, watching her. It makes your own throat tighten with fear, imagining how she felt laying there. Utterly helpless, with water being poured down her nostrils and into her throat. You almost can feel this. You can imagine the kind of terror of knowing that you are downing, over and over again.

You think about how many times he must have done this to her, and then it stops hurting, because you're all him. You look at her entirely differently now, wonder how her eyes must have looked. Wide with terror, with mucus and water and saliva all running into them. Pornographic. You imagine kneeling next to the tub with her for hours, filling her up, watching her die. But you, he, didn't actually kill her the first time.

Did she become more and more terrified as time passed on, unconvinced that you would grant her the mercy of death? Or did she find the peace that some of them do before death? Did she lay down and take it, tell herself that it was going to be over soon, tell herself to think about anything else?

Of course she didn't. You know that, because you know that you, he, talked to her the entire time. He kept her in focus so that she could choke and fight against the restraints for him, so that she could die thinking of only him.

You know he didn't love her, because this had nothing to do with love. He loved the idea of her, loved how it finally felt intimate to be able to control a person in this way, to make them plead with you for their most essential of needs. He wanted her, needed her, but that isn't love.

You, he, think about that very last time. She'd tried to close her eyes, as though not seeing the water coming might stop it from seeping into her nostrils and down inside her. But they'd opened the minute you'd tipped the bowl in your hand, and she'd looked at you. Him. Searching for answers, desperate and wide. He, you, had kept pouring the water down inside her.

She hadn't been able to resist the lure of breathing, the final stretch of allowing her whole body to burn as the water rushed in. She'd been too tired to properly put up a fight, to cough hard enough, to not drown.

He, you, had sat there with her as the lights dimmed from her eyes. He'd known that the brain takes time to die in death, that oxygen deprivation was not like flipping a switch but like snow melting under a harsh and warm sun; it was certain, but not instant. He'd talked to her, and your mind improvises the words he would have said. Probably an apology.

But not an apology for hurting her, only an apology for failing to keep her alive to endure more. He'd have stayed there minutes after her pulse had stopped, still talking, trying to reach into her death and connect with her there too. That's when he'd have punched the mirror above the sink, hitting the frame and chipping off a corner of it. He'd left a little bit of himself behind there, blood staining the faded white paint.

Failure. Failure. Failure. You/he had failed her. She'd lasted so much longer than the others, she'd been so good. It had felt so right, every time. Failure.

And then suddenly present time is back, and three people are staring at you, and you realize you've said too much of this aloud and you look at the mirror and wonder why the blood's not yours, look at the bathtub and wonder why it isn't your body strapped down. A buzzing light flickers overhead, making the whole scene look like a film whose frames are too slow, too perceptible to the human eye.

Too much too much too much. Failure failure failure. You back up out of the room, caught between wanting to never go back to being all alone in the house and wishing she'd wake up one last time so you could have more of her, and wanting to leave the lights and the people and the cameras and the noise.

Too much too much too much. Failure failure failure. You hear yourself hyper-ventilating, so you rush out of the master bedroom entirely. You realize Hannibal is there then, that he'd been watching you, that he's chasing you into the living room.

You think you're going to break when he touches you, because too much too much too much and you can't stand gentle touches. But then you see him smile out of the corner of your eyes, and you think he's nodded in acknowledgment of these feelings, because suddenly he's squeezing your wrist so hard you think he might break it.

This is good. This is quiet. You can take this kind of contact, from him at least. Your breathing starts to slow down. You start to feel your body again, especially the parts that now hurt. He lets go abruptly, leaving little transition between firm and absent. He picks up your other wrist, repeats the process. He leans in to speak to you alone. He tells you that you're going to be alright, that you're Will, that you're neither the monster nor the victim.

You're vaguely aware that others are in the house, that they can't see you break further, that you can't risk your career by being like this. You find Jack, tell him all the pertinent details. He gives you a worried look, looks at Hannibal standing across the room and eyeing you protectively.

You follow Hannibal out to the street, get into your own car and lead him to your home. You realize it's the first time he's been there, so when he gets out of the car and starts walking to the gate, you comment that you hope he's not afraid of dogs.

He gives you this look that flashes by on his face in less than half a second and is barely readable, but you hear the words "I love animals" linger in the air although he does not speak and steps forward.

The dogs crowd around him when you open the door, curious about the strange man and why their master smells so strongly of old sex and new fear. You sit down at your kitchen table with him, and it's ridiculously less formal than his dining room but you prefer the comfortably familiar right now. You feel safe in here, even with the way he looks at you.

Your eyes shift up for just a brief moment, because this is one of those occasions that call for eye contact. "I want you to do it to me," you say, stumbling over your words.

Again he smiles at you, and your eyes drop again, avoiding him. "Do what, my good Will?" he asks with humor in his voice.

One of your dogs jumps on your lap then, whining for attention. You absently stroke her head, like the calming weight of her on your lap. "Waterboard me," you finally say. "I need to feel what she felt. It's too hard for a human brain to properly imagine. My mind is protecting me from it."

You catch his nod out of the corner of your eye. He spends the next half hour making you both a pot of decaf coffee, chatting at you about the potential risks (as though you don't know), establishing a system where you can safeword out without being able to speak (as though he wouldn't know when you'd reached the breaking point.)

He repeatedly asks you to consent, and you tell him yes over and over again, almost starting to doubt that he'll give you what you're after.

But then he clears up the mugs, and he starts wandering down the hall to your bedroom. You think of asking him what he's doing until he finally grabs a chair and pulls it up to the bed, tells you to grab a few towels and some trash bags. He lays a few of the towels down on the chair and tells you this is to get your body at the right angle, to support your head and chest as it dangles off the bed. The trash bags go to protect your mattress and bed, with more towels being laid on them. It's the best he can improvise on such short notice.

You sit on the corner of the bed and watch him as he works, quick and efficient, not doubting what he needs to do. You wonder how he knows, but only for a minute, because that doesn't really matter right now. He leaves, gets the bowl of water and a cup to scoop from it, and your keys which you are to hold up in your hand and drop if you need him to help you up.

He has you lay down, lower torso, butt and legs on the bed, the rest of you angled downwards onto the chair. He tells you to hold onto the arm of the chair with your free hand, that you are to do your best to stay still. He looks at you with such fondness, trusting you to fight death in order to obey him. He pinches your glasses and picks them up, laying them down on the bed far away where you can't damage them.

He asks you to consent, again. You nod, say yes. He touches your neck, again as firmly as possible, positioning it perfectly. You take a deep breath as he covers you with the final towel, knowing that you are going to cough up plenty and probably even vomit all over yourself at some point. He lays a clean dishcloth against your nose and mouth after dipping it in the bowl. It isn't necessary, but it will make things worse for you.

Then he starts pouring on the water. It seeps down your nose, burning and making you cough and struggle immediately. It takes everything you can to not drop the keys, to take it. He keeps on pouring the water, just quickly enough to prevent you from being able to take a breath, to fill you up and make you fear that you wont be able to resist breathing in more.

It hurts more than anything your body has ever experienced, hurts more than you've ever really felt in anyone else's shoes. You're crying, coughing, exhaling and gasping against the cloth all at once. The urge to throw up is immense. Your mind thinks less and less of Hannibal, less and less of everything, as the urge not to die overwhelms you. The physical pain is bad, but the mental terror of struggling to breathe and of knowing that you're dying is so much worse.

Your loud, painful, complex, and overwhelming world shrinks to one tiny point, a single thought. Fight the death.

He counts, in a gentle voice that would be more suited to one of his therapy sessions, to 20. The cloth on your face is removed, cup set back down into the bowl of water, and he pulls you up sitting on your bed, holds you as you cough and gag, soaking the towel laying on you. You barely have enough time to catch your breath before his arms are on you again.

He lays you back down, looks to see you're still holding the keys. Pushes the wet cloth back against your face, starts again. You don't understand why you're not saying no, why you're not dropping the keys. But then the world starts to fade again, and you know the answer.

He repeats the process with you three more times after that, and each time you consent. After the last he lays you down in your bed. He cleans you up, stripping you of the towel and your wet clothes underneath and stripping away the blanket on the bed that ended up wet anyways. He cleans up the whole room, putting the chair back in it's place and clearing off the floor, wandering off to your laundry room and grabbing you another blanket on the way back. You think that part of the reason why waterboarding is a beautiful crime is how little evidence it leaves.

He takes off his own shoes and ruined jacket then, gets into bed with you, and you feel a little ridiculous laying there under the blanket with him fully dressed and you reduced to your underwear, but then he pulls you into his arms and is absolutely not gentle, squeezing you firmly.

You're so tired. You look up at him, acknowledge in your mind how happy he seems to be here. You start to drift off. "We can never do this again," you whisper at him. "liked it too much." He feels safe and warm (and that's ridiculous given what you were just doing with him), the only person you'd let hold you like this.

The next day, you catch her killer.


End file.
